Folktale Bakery

Our Sweets

Chernobog

(Triple Dark Chocolate Cookies)

Dark chocolate fudge cookies with chocolate chips, embodying this Slavic dark deity.

Chimera

(Citrus Bars)

We took inspiration from the classic three-animal chimera (a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail) and blended three fruits into our citrus bars - lemons, oranges, and limes.

Snow Queen

(Almond Cookies)

Mexican wedding cookies, Russian tea cookies, polverones - whatever name you know them by, it's impossible to resist these almond flour cookies coated in snowy confectioner's sugar.

Troll Toll

(Chocolate Chip Cookies)

A local tale! Chocolate chip cookies were invented in Whitman, Massachussetts in 1938, by Innkeeper Ruth Graves Wakefield at the Toll House Inn. A classic for humans and trolls alike, keep a few of these on you in lieu of gold pieces to get you over bridges in life.

Sasquatch

(Dark Chocolate Brownies)

You might only get a quick glance at Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, before you're left with only footprints. Fudgy on the inside and flaky on the outside, the only trace these dark chocolate brownies leave behind are crumbs.

Mountain Troll

(Oatmeal Almond Cookies)

Up a rocky path, deep within the mountains, you'll find a mix of oatmeal and almonds crushed into a perfect cookie, with or without dark chocolate chips.

About Folktale Bakery

A Castle of Gluten Free Cookies, Lemon Bars, and Sweets

The Quest for Perfection

Gluten free cookies and sweets have a terrible reputation. When we would buy the latest and greatest boxed desserts from the supermarket, we'd commonly hear my friends say, "This is good for gluten-free." But why does it need to be "good for gluten-free"? Why can't it just be good? Or great? Just because we don't eat flour doesn't mean we should settle for anything less than fantastic. And so we had our quest - to create and share gluten-free treats that are so good you don't know they're gluten-free.

Who is Folktale Bakery?

Folktale Bakery consists of just two people - Susan, the gluten-free baker, and Garett, the kitchen-hand and taste-tester. Every recipe has passed two tests - Garett's stamp of approval for "equal to or better than the flour equivalent" and a blind taste test with friends who have no dietary restrictions. We're in Somerville and do this in our spare time because we love baking, so we appreciate any and all support.

Which cookies are your favorites?

We love them all! But Garett's favorite is the Chernobog (triple dark chocolate cookies). Susan's not a huge fan of chocolate (possibly heresy for a baker, but true all the same) and loves the Snow Queens (almond cookies rolled in confectioner's sugar).

Ingredients (All Gluten-Free!)

Ingredient Sourcing

Wherever possible, we use local ingredients (the butter comes from grassfed cows in Vermont; the eggs come from free range chickens about an hour west). Not only is it great to support other small businesses, but we've found that local farmers really care about quality.

Ingredients and Allergens

We hope you've found our bakery because it's delicious and you were pleasantly surprised to learn it was gluten free! If you have specific concerns about an allergen, we want you to be as informed and safe as possible. Click here for our full menu and each items' ingredients, as well as allergen information.

Sustainability

When we realized that having a gluten free bakery would mean individually wrapping all our baked goods to prevent cross-contamination, we were incredibly disheartened and considered giving up this dream. However, we decided to frame our mindset in a different way - if we did our best to be sustainable and really promote that message, we could be part of a push towards using sustainable packaging across the industry.

All our packaging is compostable - please compost! Check with your city on how. In Cambridge, compost is one of the weekly services offered with recycling and trash. In Somerville, you can opt in to composting. It's as simple as adding another bin in your kitchen and putting it out on the curb once a week. If you're at a total loss, you can bring your packaging back to us and we'll compost it for you.

We chose compostable versus recyclable because our research found that (upon writing this) only about 9% of the 'recyclables' in the world are actually recycled; the rest are floating in the ocean or buried in landfills. Some factors that contribute to this are the lack of recycling infrastructure (even when something is successfully put in a recycling bin, there aren't facilities to process it) and the rise of recycling contamination with single stream recycling (without strict recycling rules and education, some people throw everything into recycling bins, where even small contaminations can have a hugely detrimental impact - such as not rinsing a coffee cup before tossing it into a recycling bin filled with paper and contaminating clean, recyclable paper with non-recyclable coffee stains). These two problems compound themselves and have no easy solution, so we looked to compostables instead.

Currently, we're using paper tape, beeswax wax paper, and recycled paper. Our labels are stamps with biodegradable ink. We're doing our best but know that we are not experts. If you have any suggestions on how our packaging could be more sustainable (or more affordably sustainable, because currently quite a bit of our overhead is going straight to the sustainable packaging), we really would love to hear from you. Please send us a message in the Contact section below!

Questions? Comments? Requests?

Send us an owl!